River of Life

I'm exhausted. It's been a crazy couple of days and I think it's only gonna get crazier the closer it gets to April 10th. Between work, weddings, and the convention, it's a busy time of year. It doesn't help that I've had a lot of knitting deadlines lately, either. In fact, I'm running on very little sleep right now and am a little loopier than usual.

With all the craziness, adding the River of Life Mission to my schedule wasn't in my best interest. The complex that my school belongs to is big on character education. I personally feel that although building our kids to be good people is important, ultimately the responsibility for this should lie with the parent. I've always felt this way, even when I was an elementary school student myself. I actually remember coming home in sixth grade and telling my mom what a waste of time "character education" was. Anyway, so we always push the importance of the 6 character traits but some of our teachers felt that we as a faculty did not always demonstrate these desirable characteristics. This led to us going to serve the homeless at the River of Life Mission in Chinatown. And although my current schedule is hectic, I went ahead and signed up.

Serving the homeless is something that I've always wanted to do, but I didn't know how to go about doing it. And to be honest, I cared little about demonstrating good "citizenship" to my students because I felt that my students would be far more affected if their parents were volunteering versus their teachers. A friend of mine questioned the "why" of what we were doing and joked that I must still be in high school trying to get community service hours for a scholarship. I didn't know how to explain to her why I was going. I think I figured it out. Thus far, I've been blessed to never really know hardship and I currently work in a, um, privileged community where my kids' main problem is whether or not their parents will buy them a DS/PSP/cell phone. I wanted to go to feed the homeless just to give something back. The reason was simple: I just wanted to do some good.

It was an amazing experience. The people who run the mission have really managed to create a wonderful, safe place for those unfortunate enough to live on the streets. They distribute clothing and food and provide a safe place for people to take a shower. They even have created a homey, clean, and safe place for women to live and learn so that they can get off the streets. The mission serves three meals a day to their guests. What's more, the mission provides friendship to those in need. Yes, some of the guests are homeless because of drugs, alcohol, and mental illness, but others are just hard working people who are having a difficult time making ends meet. And they are nice people, friendly people. I can't even really explain how amazing the experience was. It's just something that I want to do again and something that I want my own (future) children to do. Of course I want to raise children who do well in life, but I also want to raise children who do good.